NEW YORK -- Don't let that innocent, fairy-tale look fool you. The new "Sleeping Beauty" that American Ballet Theatre unveiled Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House amounts to a radical revision and a shocking $2-million blunder.

The 1890 "Sleeping Beauty" is not merely a ballet classic. Its plot offers a metaphor for classicism, which searches for perfection in the past, and its history has been a series of rediscoveries. Despite choreographic alterations, Diaghilev's 1921 staging and its old, Royal Ballet offspring were recollections of lost paradise vouchsafed to a fallen world.

Ballet being what it is, however, "The Sleeping Beauty's" impermanence allowed faulty memories and ambitious ballet masters to add and subtract. Then, something like a miracle occurred, in 1999, when the Kirov Ballet employed surviving notations to reproduce the original "Sleeping Beauty," true and complete. That production was the ultimate re-awakening, establishing a lofty standard. It clarified what ABT has now, once more, confused.

Perhaps it was the inapproachability of this summit that led artistic director Kevin McKenzie and collaborators Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov to take ABT in another direction, larding hallowed choreography by Marius Petipa with novelties and substituting story-book intimacy for grandeur. Tony Walton and Willa Kim's playful designs border on tacky, but are less dire than those the late Maria Bjornson concocted for the Royal.

ABT's new "Beauty" reflects the Kirov revival in some ways. It incorporates the wonderful pantomime in which King Florestan condemns and then forgives retainers who have discovered a spindle. And it includes Tchaikovsky's lyrical violin meditation, here supporting a fantasy in which fairy knights carry Prince Desire swooping past Aurora as she slumbers in an eagle-prowed boat.

Can anyone forget how the Kirov's guest conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, turned to kiss the violin soloist after every performance of the meditation? ABT's production is not exactly a Tchaikovsky love-fest, since great hunks of dance music have been slashed from Act III, while preserving a lengthy entr'acte so Carabosse and her entourage of faceless beetles can ensnare and torture the Prince. Skewing the musical plan, in Act III the Lilac Fairy returns to dance the "Gold" variation.

Attempts to make the ballet more theatrical include fairy flights achieved with lifts or wires. In the Prologue, fairies seem to alight on a tower balcony from the air, a concept undercut later, when peasant lasses arrive for the Garland Waltz in lifts. The Garland Waltz itself is an attractive, but small-scale effort featuring two youngsters.

Carabosse appears after a glowing petard falls from the sky and explodes with hisses of escaping gas. Pulling an arrow from a stag and additionally drinking magic waters, the Prince cannot help but see a vision of Aurora's castle revealed like a watermark in the backdrop. That's all good fun, but beside the point.

More significantly, despite inconsistencies in the women's ports de bras, the company dances well. Veronika Part is probably miscast as Aurora. Giselle would be her apotheosis. Yet "The Sleeping Beauty" is full of plum roles, and has drawn magnificent work from all the principals, a variety of soloists and plucky corps members.

ABT's dancers need "The Sleeping Beauty" to complete themselves as artists -- it's that important. For their sake, even a flawed "Beauty" is better than none.